Scarce British penicillin , 1943 -1944 -1945 : a CHOICE or a failure ?

Churchill's electoral defeat in July 1945 was ensured in late September 1942.

To prove that it really did reject the soon to be released Beveridge Report, the British (Conservative Party-dominated) government's all-powerful Ministry of Supply (MOS), together with representatives of the academic-military-civil servant medical science establishment, met on that date to set the British Commonwealth's production levels for penicillin for the remainder of the war.

(And first let us remind ourselves, because today's English academics - save only David Edgerton  - never do , that the civilian and military populations of the 1940s British Commonwealth cum Empire were larger than those of America.)

"Weft over Warp : Re-connecting the human fabric" (the OTHER Manhattan Project, 1939-1945)

So there is my book title + subtitle (and elevator pitch) all rolled up tight in as few words as possible.

And accompanied by a cover illustration.

Weft over Warp is ....

....the agape triumph of the other Manhattan Project over the atomic Manhattan Project ; the triumph of selfless sharing over selfish secrecy ; the triumph of the actual penicillin of veterans over the virtual penicillin of chickenhawk shirkers ...

PREFACE

Preface to "WEFT OVER WARP : the annual spirited telethon against Stone Heart disease" 

"WEFT OVER WARP" is the story of the other Manhattan Project, but in pointed contrast to the better known one , this time it is the story of the come-from-behind moral triumph of selfless sharing over selfish secrecy.

Enjoy learning how Manhattan's 'selfless penicillin project' acted as a badly needed weft to wartime's badly frayed human fabric , working to help re-connect all the war's stone-hearted warps...

Penicillin's "Third Man" : the synthetic triad of Fleming, Florey and MERCK ...

Three individuals' beliefs in the superiority of human chemists over natural chemists drove the fifteen year effort to delay the use of life-saving penicillin until it had become a patented man-made synthetic analogue : Alexander Fleming, Howard Florey and George Merck.

Fleming and Florey got Nobel prizes for their unsuccessful efforts to delay the use of this wonderful lifesaver --- Merck had to be content with the cover of TIME.

Man-made penicillin was to be literally that : something manufactured by people of the male gender with no females nurturing penicillium flasks and no fungi to be charmed into giving off their natural penicillin.

Saving the Dying : the very chemical Moderns vs the very natural postmoderns

A patient is rapidly dying of an overwhelming massive bacterial infection in a big city hospital.

All the doctors (along with the patient and their family) have only two choices of what to inject (and only a few hours to do so) if they hope to save the patient.

Door A is a relatively new man-made chemical produced in a former paint factory.

It must be given in massive doses and it has frequent serious side effects and it only slows the rate of reproduction of the few bacteria that it does affect.

Door B is an all-natural anti-bacterial agent that has been around for millions of years,  needs only tiny amounts to be effective , is completely non-toxic and kills a wide variety of bacteria stone cold.

Which medicine would tend to be picked up and used based on the limited amount of information I have given ?

In 1942 ?

In 2012 ?

Famine : a break in the human weft

Even when lack of food, like James Joyce's famous snow, is "general over Ireland" it is never been (to date) general over all the world.

A caring world puts all its energy to rushing food from when it is plentiful or at least sufficient to where it is in very short supply, so that while many may be hungry, at least they are not starving.

Baby Patricia Malone did die , a few months after her plight made PENICILLIN world famous overnight

In May 1944, Charles Davis, one of the reporters from the Hearst newspaper that got the initial penicillin to Patty's bedside in August 1943, brought readers across America up to date on Patty after his editor won the Pulitzer prize for reporting for the paper's efforts.

He revealed that six weeks after she was mere hours from death, she was released from the Lutheran Hospital, and I think the photo reveals she indeed does look radiant in her new bonnet.

But exactly three months later, (Davis says two months but I am going from death records for the only 2 year old named Patricia Malone dying in NY in late 1943) her weakened heart gave out and she died without any media attention.

A sad ending to a story I have been chasing for a long long time.

Weft over Warp : weak over strong OR connecting over stand-offishness OR both ?

Both.

I love puns and word play and my blog and musical project are called "Weft over Warp" because those three little words allow me to fully encapsulate the unexpected outcome of WWII.

In making fabric, the threads that can be thought of as the vertical members are called the warp.

They are very strong , to stand the strain of being stretched on the loom and they never ever touch each other so they can be correctly viewed as being the stand-offish threads.

By contrast, the weft are those threads that horizontally connect all the standoffish warp members - vital to holding the fabric together.

That's all they do : 'only connect'.

They are also quite weak as thread goes and yet essential in holding the fabric together ---  indeed their very weakness give the cloth extra flexibility , which also helps it survive as fabric.

So now let us look at the concept of "Warring upon the Weak", as applied to  WWII.

That concept has been generally (and erroneously) limited to the Nazi project (Aktion T4) to kill off those mentally and physically handicapped among the German population.

The pioneering SBE-Penicillin patients : a guess at their socio-economic status

Many of the patients with invariably fatal subacute bacterial endocarditis who were treated with penicillin in those early pioneering war years were housewives in their child-bearing years or were children.

These occupations, by themselves, don't give us much hint of their social status and family income.

But we do get hints here and there of the typical jobs of the employed adults among the group.

Allies : tell the NAZIS how to synthesis Penicillin --- but for God's Sake don't tell'em that it pulled kiddies back from the grave !

Probably the most widely available Allied scientific journal around the world during WWII was THE LANCET.

The fear of death being common to dictator and democrat, socialist and fascist alike, all leaders and elites welcomed the hints for prolonging life that the world's leading medical journal might provide even (or particularly) in wartime.

So in April or May 1943, a Nazi or Japanese diplomat in any neutral country could easily get a look at the March 27th 1943 copy of THE LANCET from some friendly doctor and see in it a lead editorial article all about the great progress made in the chemical synthesis of the natural antibiotic penicillin.

George M Conant - penicillin patient number three ??

Penicillin pioneer Dr Martin Henry Dawson personally treated about three dozen endocarditis patients with penicillin before he died in April 1945.

For virtually all of them we know a little bit - while of a few we know virtually nothing.

For the most, those after November 1942, we know their age at admission, gender, race, hints of their occupation and marital status and of course a bit of their past medical history and a good deal of the course of their penicillin treatments, including precise dates.

But their personal and family names are reduced to initials for first and last names.

And after January 1944, we can do longer be sure they came from streets within a mile or two of Columbia presbyterian hospital - now they could well come from as far away as near by states like New Jersey or Connecticut etc.

Gladys Hobby tried to put names behind these later patients in the early 1980s and even mentioned the first and last names of a few people she met who were still alive and didn't mind their names ending up in a book.

We do know the first and last names of Dawson's first two SBE patients, the last name of his third but nothing of his next two SBE patients - except they were men and died between the Spring of 1941 and the Spring of 1942.

We know a bit about the first of Dawson's three acute bacterial endocarditis patients - but no name.

In January 1941, Dawson's third SBE patient was a Mr Conant - he did not survive we are led to assume - for sure the penicillin failed to arrest his bloodstream infection level.

The first two patients were young males and referred to by their first and last name.

But calling someone "Mr" Conant sounds as if he is older and more middle class - but not likely to be too old or he'd be dead already from SBE.

And too well off or he be unlikely to be in a public ward rather than a private room.  And probably from New York City proper.

The New York City death records do show a male Conant dying May 31 1941 in Manhattan (where Dawson's hospital was located).

His name was George M Conant and he was 40, born in about 1902 and perhaps lived in Middletown Orange County New York State with his wife Marabelle and his three young daughters Dolores, Edith and Gloria.

We will see ....

Eleanor Evelyn Chaffee and Eleanor C Hahnel share same birthday and year - and same boss

Eleanor Chaffee's birth certificate says April 6 1916 , as does Eleanor Hahnel's birth date on her death certificate.

Eleanor Chaffee worked for years with Doctor Karl Meyer, only to be replaced suddenly by Eleanor Hahnel.

I'd say a marriage intervened between ....

Penicillin Baby little Patty Malone

A published report says that two and a half year old Patty Malone died a few weeks after first receiving some history-changing penicillin in an Manhattan hospital on August 11th 1943.

However I found a photo showing her leaving hospital looking great 6 weeks later.

Today I came across a partial record for a two year old named Patricia Malone who did die in December 21st 1943 in a Manhattan hospital, ie possibly Patty's life was only prolonged for 4 1/2 more months.

It could be our penicillin baby- I checking it out - if so , a very unhappy ending for her two parents and bigger sister ....

Patient One of the Age of Antibiotics - Aaron Alston ?

Aaron was a young black man suffering from invariably fatal SBE heart disease when on October 16th 1940 he received the world's first antibiotic needle from Dr Martin Henry Dawson at NY's famous Columbia Presbyterian hospital.

He received some more penicillin the next few days and again beginning New year's Eve 1941 but died Jan 25th 1941.

His fellow patient in this historical event, a young Jewish man, Charles Aronson, was still alive the last time his doctor checked, which was in November 1945....

Forget honouring Dr Dawson - he won't want it.

But in 2015, 75 years after this historical event, shouldn't the US Post Office issuing a stamp honouring these two very brave pioneers of the age of antibiotics ?

"You can't end a war, begun in selfishness, by piling on more selfishness" - Martin Henry Dawson

Dawson didn't believe the Allies could hope to sustain a moral coalition to end Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo's war of selfishness by piling on their own examples of selfishness.

Wefting the Human Fabric

Without the human wefts among us, I doubt the human species would live on Earth for very long - we are too inclined to be self-centred, self-satisfied, selfish,  greedy and violent.

No  'Type As' or 'Alpha Males', the wefts may 'only connect' but in doing so they hold the human fabric together ...

The annual spirited Telethon against Stone Heart disease

An annual telethon (put on by spirits from the past) to prevent the re-occurrence of Stone Heart disease ???!

Is it a fund-raising telethon for research on the calcified (stone) formations on heart valves that leads to often-fatal SBE  endocarditis?

Or  a telethon to prevent the return of post-modern Humanity to being mean and selfish and stone hearted , ie 'modern' ?

Or both ......

Exploiting eugenic purity and war scarcity for profit : the MERCK story

A culture (the Modern Era 1870-1960) that successfully convinced itself that eating whole wheat bread mother made herself in her own kitchen was unsafe and that white bread made in a factory a hundred miles away was much safer  is obviously crazy enough to fall for pretty well anything and everything.

Hitler and Mussolini and Stalin aside, it also fell hard for the idea of extending the false promises of eugenic purity to everything.

Rejecting mama's fresh from the oven bread was just a pre-game warm-up.

The totally unexpected wartime triumph of 'selfless penicillin'

I like to claim that my thesis found in "Weft Over Warp" takes a very different and controversial take on WWII.

(But of course, authors - and above all, historians - are expected to claim their work says something totally new and totally provocative.)

So here it goes : I think you will agree that our conventional view of WWII focuses on its act of evil - as if to say it was six years of unrelenting evil sandwiched between two longer periods of peace and good will.

My take is that before, during and after WWII , the modern world was so dominated by selfishness and self-centredness that it was the unnoticed norm and that what now really stands out about WWII, 75 years after the event,  were the rare -bright/shining/unexpected - examples of noble selflessness.

The unexpected triumph of Selfless penicillin over Selfish penicillin : weft over warp

Martin Henry Dawson and Howard Walter Florey represented the weft and the warp of the wartime penicillin saga : selfless penicillin over selfish penicillin.

Florey's team agreed enough with George W Merck's team to want wartime penicillin only made in quantities enough to give the Allies a surprise military advantage over the Axis.

No penicillin for Neutral nations, for Axis and Occupied civilians or Allied POWs , very little for Allied civilians or for Allied wounded considered to be unfit to return to battle or war munitions work.

Florey wanted the commercial success and scientific prestige of penicillin to go to Oxford University and England and probably the ICL chemical firm ; Merck  to America and the Merck drug company and the American OSRD agency.

Both wanted penicillin to be like the earliest success of Florey's mentor's Mellanby and Merck's own firm : fooling the public into believing that patented synthetic Vitamin C made by chemists with PhDs was better and safer than eating a raw impure - grown by peasants - orange.

So they strongly strongly opposed Dawson teaching ordinary doctors to grow raw - crude - natural penicillin in their hospitals and curing patients with it.

They wanted penicillin's fame and money to go to one person, one university, one country, one firm, one side in the war, to the scientific elite only , to men chemists only over women natural penicillin growers - on and on and on.

Selfish - consistently- and on so many levels.

Dawson wanted all in the wartime world to know how to grow natural Public Domain penicillin  and to do so - now ! - to save all sorts of lives all over the world - particularly saving the lives of the so called "handicapped" that the Allies and Axis were equally determined to throw under the bus during the war.

Chandler cribs Joyce : the last paragraphs of THE DEAD and THE BIG SLEEP

I'm just sayin' :

If you can't sense the deep and soulful connection between these two very famous last paragraphs , than you really have no ear for poetry in the English language.

And yes, I hope the last paragraphs in my epilogue to WEFT OVER WRAP also successfully evokes both THE DEAD and THE BIG SLEEP's last paragraphs too ....